There are four or five drops of water making their way down Chuck’s face, beading up into larger drops, waiting to fall but then not falling. “This is some storm,” he says, twisting his shorts again. “We never had this many big storms in one season when I was a kid.”
She passes him a towel. Chuck holds it but doesn’t use it. “That’s what they say.”
“And Patricia doesn’t even believe in global warming.”
One drop swings like a charm from the end of his nose. Still he doesn’t use the towel.
Chuck raises the timbre of his voice to imitate his sister. “‘God won’t let us die.’ That’s what she says.”
It’s impossible. The drop can’t continue to hold on.
“I tell her that God lets us die every day. I don’t even know what she’s talking about.”
It’s unbearable, hanging off the very tip. Ada takes the towel and presses it up against him, both her hands open on his face. She holds it there, blotting him out. Ada can feel the cartilage of his nose through the towel, the warmth of his exhalation. She feels his cheekbones and the moisture off his skin. She removes the towel and there, he is dried.
He smiles, stops. “Why’d your fiancé die so young?”
She drops the towel. As with a lie told in childhood, even Ada has forgotten it’s a lie. “Terrorists,” she says, and begins to smile until she sees how that word tears through Chuck’s face, corroded blood or black ink.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks.
But Ada does not have a good answer. So she pulls him to her. She tilts her neck, smelling Chuck’s metallic breath. She lifts her chin and Chuck follows, bending to the opposite side, closing in on her. When they’d been together before, it was a mistake, malt liquor, and she had told Chuck the following day, “Not with the neighbors.” But here in the hurricane Ada opens her mouth. She silences him. He grabs her quickly with plodding hands, baseball mitts moving across her back.
She’s glad the sneakers are already removed when they make their way through the near-dark room and onto her bed.
Her nose presses against his skin. Yeast and old newspapers. A wrong smell. Chuck is a wrong shape also, like a tall, thin chest of drawers. Their bodies do not fit together. Still, she tries. She wraps her arms around him. She moves more out of memory than tenderness. She hitches her leg across him, tearing into him. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”
Chuck is clean shaven, which means a bowl of cold water and a razor, grooming himself in a shed without proper plumbing. A gentle action. Two people who live their lives alone in rooms doing strange, gentle things can sometimes be together in the middle of a dangerous storm in a house made of glass. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”
“Mercy,” he says, arcing his thinness above her. “Mercy.”
Ada hasn’t any idea why he should ask for mercy.
*
When it’s over they lie on their backs breathing, staring up into the storm though they can’t see it. Just a white ceiling with one small crack in the left corner by the doorjamb. She brushes Chuck with her thigh. Maybe the wind will rip the roof from its joists. Or she could just destroy the order of the world. She does it all the time.
Chuck stands and two perfume bottles on her bureau click together. He’s naked in front of her. “I’d be curious to hear what you think about it.”
By “it” she really hopes he doesn’t mean his lovemaking prowess. There are mysterious splotches on his torso like some rare infectious disease.
“I mean when it first happened, were you surprised? I wasn’t. We’ve been asking for it for years.”
He’s talking about the planes, the buildings. “Oh.” Ada pulls the sheet over her head.
“It’s a war,” Chuck says. “But I don’t mean terrorism. I mean capitalism. If you’re going to set up hierarchies where one person has very little and another person has a lot more, that’s war. Then you’re asking for it.”
Ada is perfectly flat under her sheet in the gray light. Her eyes dart back and forth, as if some way out, a secret tunnel, might appear beneath the covers. The wind is so loud she can pretend she doesn’t hear Chuck.
“Of course nature and the environment are always the lowest man on the totem pole. No one looks out for nature under capitalism because trying to persuade an American to not want more, to stop buying things when they feel badly, is like trying to persuade a person to stop breathing.”
She sees her chest rise and fall below the sheet. She hears Chuck pacing at the end of the bed, delivering his fiery sermon.
“When it happened I thought now America will wonder why we’d been attacked and then we’d see how capitalism failed us, how it kills people every day. Cancer, hunger, obesity, heart disease, alcoholism, car crashes.” Chuck drives a fist into his other palm. He tallies more casualties. “Genetically fucked-up corn, tobacco, kids on antidepressants, diabetes, asthma, drugs, pollution. This is what American capitalism manufactures. This is our GNP.”
The window screen in the bedroom sucks in and out as if it will tear. Something heavy strikes the bathroom skylight. Chuck stops. Ada sits up at the noise. She lets the sheet fall. Her spine curls to a curve. Her boobs touch her stomach. Chuck’s nude body makes the trace of a ghost in the room. Here in the storm it’s easy for her to see how rigid his spine is. Ada slouches even farther.
“Why was he there?” Chuck asks. “I thought you said you guys lived outside Providence.”
Ada focuses on the individual fibers of tan carpeting. And just then, thoughts she’d left back in Rhode Island arrive as if they’d been delayed by careless movers who came south via Alaska. “We’re here. Sorry we’re late.” Ada’s lungs slam shut. She sees Chuck’s splotchy skin and imagines she’s burning those red spots into his flesh with just her eyes, as if the power of her thoughts could hurt someone.
*
“Hello, sweetheart,” she’d said to the ultrasound machine. The Rhode Island obstetrician rubbed jelly across Ada’s belly, then turned on the device so that an image appeared on the monitor. A tiny creature swimming inside Ada, its heart beating as fast as a hummingbird. The baby swam. Ada reached her hand out to touch the screen, stroking the black-and-white image there, petting it. A tiny spine, a tiny stomach, the bones of the baby’s small feet. Ada could feel the warmth of the monitor underneath her hand as if it were her baby’s blood. “Hello, sweetheart. Hello.”
*
She moves quickly, finding her clothes at the base of the bed. A long-sleeved T-shirt, a jean skirt, slip-on leather sandals. She dresses. “Excuse me,” she says without waiting for Chuck’s answer. Ada closes the door behind her and, using a chair from her dining set, catches the bedroom door handle underneath it, wedging the chair, locking the door shut, just like they do in the movies.
“Chuck?” She speaks to him through the door, fingering the wood of it. “Try the door.”
“Huh?”
“I locked you in there.”
He tries the door handle and the chair holds. “Why?”
She listens.
He’s quiet for a long time except for his breathing. “Oh,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that about capitalism killing more people than terrorism. To you. I’m sorry.”